Monthly Archives: May 2017

Emerging dicot seedlings have a habit of looking very like one another, but this soon wears off. (Click a thumbnail for the gallery)

Gaillardia are supposed to be surface sown, but they look miserable, the feeble rootlets crawling over the soil to make a way;

even these older gaillardia still seem uncomfortable. I have grave doubts about pricking them out.

By contrast, the catananche’s first true leaves shoot up into the air like a class of confident seven-year-olds vying for attention.

After the first seed leaves, rudbeckia dress themselves up like microscopic cactuses

while harebells are so tiny and delicate it is difficult to imagine raising them to maturity,

and brachycombe are enthusiastic and sprawly.

Verbascum look tidy and brisk as seedlings, but they are telling porkies.

Approaching maturity they can throw a wilt with thespian virtuosity for the merest nothing: too damp, dry, sunny or shady, warm or cold, wind in the east or wind in the west, or possibly because someone said an unkind word to them (that would be me).

They are also maddeningly vulnerable to slugs and snails, and, it turns out, a choice food plant for some dratted lepidoptera. I don’t think this fusspot will be getting any second chances around here …

… there was a communal bake-in, requiring several hours and some curious culinary procedures involving pineapple and limes. The presence of a live chicken on the kitchen floor probably didn’t help.

When I’d finished laughing, I ate my piece, which was rather good, and juicy with fruit, (though I admit to scraping off some of the drooly icing – nice flavour, but rather too sweet in a dollop like this).

I may have selected this based on a subconscious connection with grass and the breaking of impenetrable sod:

Somehow I have managed to miss reading it down all the years; meeting as an adult, it raised quite a few questions. One concerns the apparently reckless way the father takes his family off on a dangerous journey. We have gone soft now. Or perhaps it didn’t seem as dangerous, when any life was dangerous – even staying tucked into the most secure and prosperous home could not protect you from the epidemics of infectious disease which cut swathes through many a family. Or perhaps pressure of poverty was strong enough to drive the migrants on. Then there’s the way Ingalls apparently makes the decisions without input from his wife (ah the good old days – ‘she for god in him’ etc.) And worst, of course, are the passages dealing with the native Americans. Ingalls is portrayed as liberal, humane, but assumes that the western country is his to take because the inhabitants “weren’t using it”, and he is furious when, having illegally moved into Indian reservation land, he and other settlers were required to leave “their” farms. Ugly.

Then there is this delicate little sippet of a book.

Ah, the pure sensory pleasure of its satiny dust jacket, the smooth crispness of the coated paper, the careful balance of text and image, the reposeful colours, the spine coherent without wilful springiness, the clean smell rising from every page turn. This made it quite difficult to concentrate on the actual subject matter, but it too was charming in its miscellany of science, technology, art and history, and although the coverage is very slight, there’s a further reading list handy at the back.

One phrase, though originally intended to be satirical, spoke truth to me as an observer: Thomas Tomkis in 1615 characterised a telescope as “an engine to catch starres”. Out in the darkness with the Dob, that’s just what it feels like.

housework is never all very well, but no doubt it is good for one’s character (just some cushion plumping still to be done),

but they interfere with the important things in life, namely watching someone colour in the floor of the Pacific stripe by stripe. I feel like Slartibartfast.

Then there is the crucial business of blue water going by for an hour, or possibly two, occasionally diversified by some passing gelatinous improbability, until we arrive at the main event: the ocean floor, a varying number of kilometres but always a Very Long Way Down.

Here one can inspect more gelatinous creatures, the occasional fish, and a variety of coral. Unfortunately, being live from the other side of the world, they usually reach bottom just at the time all British people should be in bed. What technical genius, though, not only to send ROVs to that depth, but to live stream HD video to all and sundry, along with baffled commentary from assorted specialists. It’s just as much fun as reindeer – though I do occasionally wish the scientists were speaking Norwegian.

For those who live in another hemisphere, or don’t mind propping up their eyelids with matchsticks:

Reindeer and the garden have cut severely into reading time. In a remnant, I have caught up with one of my Bargains.

Reading about the ancient games was a strange mixture: some aspects so familiar, and most so entirely alien. I offer one quotation.

Kleomedes of Astypalaia, though denied victory in the boxing at the 492 BC Olympiad – because he killed his opponent – and despite a subsequent fit of madness that caused the deaths of sixty schoolchildren, … was likewise paid heroic honours, sanctioned by the Delphic oracle. (p 168)

Hmmmm.

Elsewhere, I stole some time from the garden to go shopping. Prize of the day was buttons. Not quite sure what to do with them, but buttons always come in. (Don’t they?)